Hamburger menu

From a chat with a customer service rep at my bank, in response to my question about how to link accounts:

Kathy: Access the "hamburger" menu on the top right corner.

John: Hamburger?!

John: I'm a vegetarian

Kathy: The selection right beside the gear. Three lines.

Kathy: It is a veggie burger.

John: OK

My suggestion to vegetarian/vegan restaurants

More entrees featuring recognizable vegetables and fewer entrees along the lines of "vegan steak," please?

We're all hypocrites.

"Homo hypocritus" is a model of human behavior proposed by Robin Hanson (on his blog, Overcoming Bias, which often has thought-provoking observations about the quirks of human thought and behavior).

As Hanson puts it, a "large fraction of modern behavior is explained by our evolved capacities and tendencies to pretend to do X while really doing Y."

He gives this example: "Forager norms cut overt Y of dominance, bragging, sub-coalitions." This would explain why political candidates habitually declare, "This is not about me!" By definition, a political campaign is about the candidate, and they surely know this. But they also know that admitting this would be against their interests.

Hypocrisy is so fundamental to human nature that I would suggest it's not very productive to try to seek out, expose, and shame those who are guilty of it. The taboo against hypocrisy leads people to come up with convoluted and unconvincing rationales for why, for instance, there's no inconsistency in being a vegetarian without being a vegan. The more useful approach would be to admit that there is an inconsistency but explain why it's preferable to other ways of eating/living that are also inconsistent. I imagine that a lot of benefits would result if it were more socially acceptable to admit that we're all hypocrites.

UPDATE: This post was "featured" on Brazen Careerist. In the comments section over there, Jamie Nacht Farell makes an ironic confession:

[H]ypocrisy is probably the one constant in my personality as I've changed through the years.

"If you consume dairy, you should eat veal."

A chillingly utilitarian rebuff to vegetarians.

The argument is that if you eat or drink dairy products, you're supporting the existence of male calves, since "dairy cows must give birth to provide milk." These calves "are unsuitable for beef production and too costly to keep on the farm." Something must be done with those animals, and the best result -- even just from the calves' perspective -- would be to humanely raise them for meat.

But even if I accept that practical argument as far as it goes, the only thing it would seem that I "should" do is: hope that veal is produced -- and eaten by someone (of course), but not necessarily me. That's different from saying that I "should" be one of the people eating the veal. It doesn't seem like I'd have that kind of moral obligation unless I somehow knew that the amount of veal being consumed were insufficient to use up all the male calves already being born.

By the way, this is a noteworthy passage from the linked article:

The renaissance of humanely raised veal is driven in part by small farmers who embrace old-fashioned animal husbandry and see veal as an extra revenue stream. But it also has been spurred by the success of animal rights campaigns and the resulting collapse in demand for veal. In 1944, Americans ate 8.6 pounds of veal per person annually, according to Agriculture Department figures. In 2004, the latest year for which data are available, consumption had fallen to less than half a pound. It hasn't topped one pound per person since 1988.

This illustrates Mark Bittman's principle: "Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." (Quoted here, from the video here.)

Anti-vegetarian argument #2: Tradition

In a discussion about vegetarians and Thanksgiving, an AskMetafilter commenter said this:

Food isn't just fuel - it's a whole lot of what symbolizes who you are and where you come from. One of the problems with giving up meat, especially if it's not by your own choice, is that you're giving up pieces of culture, heritage, family traditions, ties to your childhood memories, ties to the way your great grandma cooked for her children...

For some reason that's an aspect of vegetarianism that isn't often addressed.

More recently, in a personal essay in the current New York Times magazine, Jonathan Safran Foer says:

When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. ... We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients. ...

In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. ...

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. ... [M]y choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

That sounds like Foer basically agrees with the AskMetafilter commenter. But he has a second thought:

Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. ... [S]he would tell me about her escape from Europe [in World War II], the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn't. It was the story of her life -- "Listen to me," she would plead -- and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

Foer explains the lesson at the end of the essay.

It's actually not the kind of essay that most appeals to me. I prefer to read writing that gets straight to the point instead of taking extra time to build up characters who gradually embody that point.

I also find it unfortunate that Foer puts down the role of "reason" in decision-making, saying that "stories" are more important. Of course, this is a self-serving view for a professional storyteller. But he himself relies on reason when he says:

A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.

This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

But none of that gets to the heart of the "tradition" argument. I would argue that tradition simply isn't as important as numerous other factors -- but that's not likely to be satisfying to those who raise the tradition concern in the first place.

Perhaps it is better to use "stories" rather than "reason" to respond to that concern. That's what Foer does in this essay -- to chilling effect in the final section.

25 random things about me

It's the craze that's sweeping Facebook:

In the past few weeks, a chain letter called "25 Random Things About Me" has wormed its way through Facebook at an alarming speed. The exhibitionistic format has remained surprisingly intact: In addition to rattling off 25 facts about themselves, "Random Things" authors are supposed to tag 25 of their Facebook friends, prompting them to write their own note and tag 25 more people, and so forth and so on.

[UPDATE: The evolutionary basis of "25 things."]

Here's mine, cross-posted from Facebook:

1. My first word was "happy." My first phrase was "Beach Boys." My first sentence was "I want it."

2. I haven't eaten meat since I was in elementary school.

3. I was baptized on Wall Street.

4. My favorite band is the Beatles. I used to say my favorites Beatles song was "You Never Give Me Your Money," but I can't decide anymore.

5. In the summer between 7th and 8th grades, I got an electric guitar and practiced about 8 hours a day.

6. The most famous people I've met are Al Franken, Christopher Hitchens, and Lorrie Moore, the last of whom is an old friend of the family.

7. I have a weird set of movies I watch over and over, while I haven't seen a lot of the most famous ones. I've never seen Forrest Gump, Titanic, etc. Movies I've seen a ridiculous number of times: My Dinner with Andre, Back to the Future trilogy, Annie Hall, Duck Soup.

8. I'm a pessimist and a skeptic, but I try not to be a cynic. I think the world is probably doomed, but I have confidence that a lot of individuals will make a good-faith effort to try to make things better along the way to our demise.

9. I spent a month in Rome but have never seen the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.

10. Since the beginning of 2007, I always wanted Obama as president and Biden as VP. I couldn't believe I hit the nail on the head.

11. I have a vivid memory of touching Courtney Love's bare shoulder when she was crowd surfing at a Hole concert, one of the emblematic moments of my teenage years.

12. When I was a law review editor I spent about half an hour on the phone with an author debating every single contraction in the piece, about 60 in all. He loved contractions, and I didn't want any of them, so we compromised and changed about half of them to full words.

13. People tell me I'm very "tech-savvy," but I'm actually technophobic. I waited as long as possible to switch to a cell phone and digital camera, and I still don't have any kind of iPhone/Blackberry/etc. because I prefer writing things down in notebooks.

14. I wish I'd been European instead of American; I think I'd fit in better in Europe.

15. When I was in middle school, I didn't cut my hair for a long time and I looked like this.

16. When I was 2, I played a game we called "do counter," which was getting up on the kitchen counter and recognizing spices. I knew each one by smell, or as I called it back then, "hmell."

17. This article accurately describes me.

18. The first time I acted in a play, there was a part at the end where the other actor ran up to me (per the script), but I accidentally struck her forehead with my teeth, causing her to bleed onstage. We were both fine, but I felt really bad. People in the audience didn't realize anything had gone wrong; they thought it was fake blood.

19. I cook myself dinner almost every night.

20. I used to sketch people's faces all the time, and I wish I still had the time or inclination to do so. One of my favorites is a drawing I did in 7th grade of Justice Scalia.

21. I can't whistle. But I'm really good at snapping.

22. I can't give you an answer about whether I'm a liberal or not. I often agree with them, but I also think they get too much stuff wrong.

23. I have a crush on Regina Spektor and Tracyanne Campbell, the singer from Camera Obscura.

24. I'm tired of being in my 20s; I can't wait till I'm in my 30s.

25. I started a blog last April. You should bookmark this link and read it on a regular basis.

Obviously, that last one was done for Facebook and is a moot point for you who are reading it here.

Mark Bittman on how America's relationship with food has gone wrong

Every American should watch this entertaining 20-minute talk by Mark Bittman:



My favorite point:

I'm not a vegetarian.… Now, don't get me wrong — I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year.… That's just the United States.… Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.

Anti-vegetarian argument #1: "Aren't you morally condemning most people?"

Megan McArdle says she's morally compelled to be a vegan, but she's uncomfortable with the implication that she's morally condemning people who aren't vegans.

How do vegans or vegetarians resolve this dilemma (if it is a dilemma)?

On the one hand, she says:

Like most vegetarians, I suspect that my angriest critics are those who, like me, feel that eating meat is wrong--and therefore want me to do it too, so that they don't have to think about their own choices. Well, apologies, but I think that I have a moral obligation to be a vegan.

But on the other hand:

Obviously, having decided that it's morally wrong to eat animal products, I can't exactly say that I think it's perfectly okay for other people to do so. On the other hand, I recognize that the universe is a complicated place, and my moral judgements are imperfect.

Or maybe a better way to say it is that there are moral judgements, and then there are moral judgements. I wish more people would stop eating meat, but I also think it is possible to be a perfectly good, moral human being and still eat meat, in a way that I don't think it is possible to be a good moral human being and still rape twelve-year olds. I have judged the behavior and found it wanting, but I do not judge, in any way, the people who indulge in it. I think there's something wrong with eating meat, but I don't think there's anything wrong with meat-eaters.

(By the way, she says she wouldn't raise her kids vegan, because she doesn't think that's healthy. But she would consider raising them vegetarian. And she obviously thinks it's healthy for an adult to be a vegan.)

I admire her attempt to resolve this issue through some kind of middle way. And she seems close to the right answer with her distinction between "the behavior" and "the people who indulge in it." But that still strikes me as too facile, because it begs the question: "Well ... why not judge the people who indulge in it?"

I think McArdle is making two key mistakes:

1. Even though she's trying to point out a grey area, it's just not enough of a grey area! I can't imagine that meat-eaters will be thrilled to learn that they aren't as bad as child rapists. She's still implying that she draws a big dividing line of moral judgment, with herself on the good side of the line, and meat-eaters on the other side. Now, she does explicitly contradict this. But I don't see her resolving the contradiction -- it just hangs there.

2. She's focusing on the negative. The whole theme of her post is moral condemnation: should we judge such-and-such people as immoral, or not?

Here's what I propose instead:

1. Don't compare one group of people vs. another group; compare how someone stands if they take one path vs. how that same person stands if they take another path.

And this is key: remember that there are millions of moral decisions any given person faces.

Whether to eat meat is a moral decision. You don't get to just walk away from it -- unless it's truly impossible for you to live a healthy vegetarian lifestyle, which is doubtful. But it's just one of many. There are lots of personal decisions that might matter more. There are social or political movements you might be involved with. And on and on and on. The world is complicated, and there are too many moral issues out there to divide people into good vs. bad based on one issue.

All I know is that I'm a better person than I would have been if I'd been eating meat for the past 17 years. But this in no way implies that I'm a better person than any particular other person who eats meat. After all, they might have their own cause that's dear to their heart that I haven't been active in doing much about.

I mean, if you have a friend who contributes a lot of time and money to fighting malaria, would you even think of saying, "Hey, you can't think it's a good thing for you to be doing that, because I've barely lifted a finger to do anything about malaria, and it would be highly presumptuous of you to think that you're better than me!"?

Of course not. You would just say, "Well, that's great. Good for you." In other words, you would stay POSITIVE! And that would be the end of it. No one's condemning anyone. And that leads to my second point...

2. Being a vegetarian/vegan is contributing to a good cause.

We need to put aside any notions of "Meat is murder!" (Whether such extreme views are nearly as common among vegetarians as they're often portrayed is another question.) The fact is, in our society, eating meat is the default, the baseline, the path of least resistance.

If you're utterly unconvinced by the arguments for being a vegetarian, then fine -- there's nothing more to the analysis. For you, that "baseline" is all there is.

If, on the other hand, you're (at least somewhat) convinced, then it's up to you to judge for yourself what's worth doing to go above that default baseline.

Maybe you'll be a vegetarian (like me) or a vegan (like McArdle). Or you might be a "flexitarian" instead. (Michael Pollan, the author of the popular book In Defense of Food, has endorsed this idea. See item "6" under page 11 in this article.)

Given how strong the message is in American society that eating inordinate quantities of meat is the norm, I consider any effort at cutting down on meat consumption -- even if it's not totally eliminated from your diet -- to be a contribution to a good cause.

It just so happens that I've "cut down" by 100% (just for meat -- there are plenty of other areas where I'm far from pure). If I could (somehow) convince two people each to cut down by 50%, I'd consider that to be exactly equivalent to convincing one person to do what I've done. I don't care about any given person's moral purity; I care only about the actual consequences for the world as a whole.

But now here's the meta point: who cares what I think? Who cares what Megan McArdle thinks? We're just random bloggers. We don't have any authority over how you live your life. So even if we're judging you, why does this matter?

Maybe you're thinking, "Well, you two specifically don't matter a whole lot, but you represent what most vegetarians do, and that certainly matters, doesn't it?" Well, no, I don't think it does. If I don't have any authority over you, then neither does the aggregate of all vegetarians in the world.

You might also be surprised by how little they're even thinking about you at all. Meat-eaters sometimes seem to forget that vegetarians live in the real world, where 90-something % of people eat meat on a regular basis. It's just not remarkable in the slightest to see someone eating meat. Based on everything I've ever experienced in real life, the image of vegetarians who are easily shocked or offended at meat, or who go around condemning people they see eating meat, is a myth.

But let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that they are condemning you.

Well, they haven't really perceived you. I don't have the information I would need to judge you even if I wanted to. You're the only one who's seen how you've lived throughout your whole life. So the only person who can fairly judge your moral character is you.

Should we eat Frankenmeat?

As someone who's a vegetarian for largely ethical reasons, I'm intrigued by the prospect of scientists in a lab creating meat from real animal cells -- using the same basic mechanism as human stem-cell research -- that would be food from the start, bypassing the being-a-living-animal stage.

There seems to be a buzz around lab-created meat: there was an International In Vitro Meat Symposium in Norway last month.* And predictably, PETA (an organization I have very mixed feelings about) is promoting the idea by offering a million dollars to the first scientist who brings the concept to fruition.

Unfortunately, the plan has some serious (I'm guessing fatal) flaws. For one thing, the progress has been miniscule (literally) and glacial:

Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we're still years -- or, more likely, decades -- away from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team's lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per pound—assuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff.

But what really disturbs me about the whole project is that

manufactured meat promises to replicate only the taste and texture of processed meat; as far as we are from enjoying lab-grown hamburger, we're even further from perfecting man-made rib-eyes. So even if meat labs did become viable commercial enterprises, the naturally raised meat industry would hardly vanish.

Given our penchant for gluttony, affordable lab-grown meat could even be harmful to our health: We might simply increase our beef and pork consumption to keep pace with production, as has occurred over the past half-century. (According to this disturbing assessment, we annually consume 50 pounds more meat per-capita than Americans did in the 1950s.)

As that passage implies, it's foolish to assume that either the production or the consumption of meat is static rather than dynamic, although this is often presupposed in arguments against vegetarianism ("They're just gonna die anyway").** This contradicts the plain facts and basic rules of economics.

But there's one thing that specifically does not disturb me. William Saletan (a liberal who often writes about bioethical issues but is not a vegetarian) says that lab-made meat would be

a colossal concession ... for the animal-rights movement. Lab meat "would mimic flesh," says PETA's press release. Mimic? Lab meat is flesh. ... It won't walk or quack like a duck, so technically, it's not a duck. But if it tastes like duck, chews like duck, and comes from duck, it's duck.

Well, I'm suspicious of arguments that hinge on a semantic distinction like "duck" vs. "a duck." It seems to me that if something is one of those, it's both. If we're attributing momentous moral significance to a little thing like the word "a," that should set off alarm bells: is that really what matters? I don't think so.

People have this impulse to turn moral debates into semantic debates. "What counts as torture?" "What counts as human life?" "When is someone dead?" "Is lab meat made of animals?"

I don't care about any of those questions! When it comes to ethical issues, these are the only things I care about: (1) What exactly is going on? (2) Is it a good thing or bad thing for that to be happening?

I don't care if waterboarding or slapping someone in the face is called "torture." It either will or won't be called torture depending on how any given person chooses to use that word. The important question is: Is that behavior something that we should be engaging in? Skip the semantics and go straight to the ethics.

Yes, language can be essential to thought, but language can also box in thought. (I'm inclined to agree with the thought-precedes-language side of the debate outlined at that link.)

If you want to say that lab meat is made of animals just as normal meat is, then fine. That just means there's no semantic distinction. But what makes normal meat morally problematic doesn't exist in lab meat. A piece of lab meat doesn't have a history as a living, breathing, moving, and -- above all -- sentient creature with feelings. Normal meat does.

Lab meat does raise ethical issues, but they're pragmatic ones like whether the environmental consequences would outweigh the potential for adding more fuel to our meat addiction. I see no fundamental (non-pragmatic) moral problem raised by lab meat.

Again, I doubt the whole thing will work at all. But if producing lab meat from animal cells worked perfectly -- which would have to mean it would be satisfying enough to meat-eaters that they'd reduce the rest of their meat consumption -- then wouldn't it be not just OK, but morally obligatory?


(Photo by Emily Chastain)

* I once had a debate with one of my fellow law review editors about whether you can ever have a capitalized proper noun after an indefinite article ("a" or "an"). Voila! [back]

** I'm planning a series of posts responding to common arguments against vegetarianism like this one. Stay tuned. If you happen to have a favorite anti-vegetarian argument, please send it my way, and I might include it in one of the upcoming posts. [back]

Two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas

Continuing with Bertrand Russell's chapter on Descartes in The History of Western Philosophy, and also moving on to the other great rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz...

As the heading says, I've been looking for two-sentence refutations of profoundly influential ideas. This little project stems from my visceral revulsion at the debate trick in which people -- not in everyday conversation, but professors or other public experts -- respond to ideas they disagree with by saying, "Well, the problems with that are well-known, but there's no time to explain all that now." No! If you think that some position that's on the table is seriously mistaken, you should want to convince people of this as efficiently as possible. If you can't explain it right now, you can't expect anyone to believe you based on those mysterious arguments behind the curtain.

Russell is really good at avoiding this problem; here are three of his two-sentence refutations:

1. Refutation of Descartes's famous "I think; therefore, I am" argument:

The word 'I' is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premise in the form 'there are thoughts.' The word 'I' is grammatically convenient but does not describe a datum.

(This is a well-worn objection. Russell may have been cribbing from William James, who wrote that we should say, in the third person, "It's thinking," just as we say, "It's raining," so that we don't make Descartes's mistake!)

2. Refutation of Spinoza's theory* that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

3. Refutation of Leibniz's we-live-in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds argument based on free will:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge, who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will.

Since those two sentences give you the gist of the argument, I don't think it'd be breaking my two-sentence limit to add his next sentence as elaboration:

The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

Back to refutation #2 (cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe): I absolutely agree with this, and I hope it shapes my worldview. It's probably a big part of why I'm so indifferent to religion.

I do not take the view, which many secularists take, that cruelty and suffering are just there and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I think is that even if there's some sort of cosmic significance to everything in the world, the suffering is still there, and you can't rationalize it away. The fact that X hurts someone is, on the face of it, a reason to conclude: X is bad.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for an exception to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments: we want the least possible of it! So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception -- maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! What, does that make you queasy? Don't worry! It's sure to be a net plus in the end -- it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. The fact that God is held to lower moral standards than humans are is ... interesting.

Turning to #3 from the list: It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's theory that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I have the sense that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently, e.g. "Everything works out for the best," it's still hugely influential.

OK, so the above Leibniz and Spinoza theories are closely related. You could group both of them under "It's all for the best." That's the basic thrust. Well, there's one oddity about this kind of outlook that I don't understand:

If it is true that suffering is justified in the long run by our ability to learn from it, or because this follows from our having free will (since free will, which is a precondition for virtue, entails the freedom to hurt people) ... and if you don't believe that animals operate at such a sophisticated level ... then doesn't this mean that the uniquely human ability to remember and reflect on pain weighs in favor of treating animal pain as more of a cause for concern than human pain?

Sorry to cram so much into one sentence there. But you see what I'm getting at, right?

In just about any debate over the moral status of animals that I've ever seen, a key point is always: "Well, how about the capacity to feel pain? Isn't that morally significant, and don't we share it with animals?"

The response is then going to be: "Hold on, there's a big distinction between humans and animals. We might all -- humans and animals -- be able to feel the initial stabs of pain. But only humans can intellectually reflect on that experience later on."

Well, that really seems to mitigate the suffering of humans. Meanwhile, animals are left merely having suffered without gaining anything from it.

That's all disingenuous for me to say! Because I don't necessarily accept those premises. As I said, I don't believe in justifying human suffering through cosmic mitigating factors. I'm just saying that if you do, you should follow your view to its logical consequences.

At the risk of loading the issue: if Anne Frank's poignant conviction in the underlying goodness of humanity can somehow mitigate the horror of the Holocaust, then that should decrease our concern for the mass killing of humans relative to the mass killing of animals. Of course, other factors might still support caring more about humans than animals. But to the extent that you rely on Spinoza/Leibniz-style justifications of human suffering, this weighs on the other side of the scale.

As always, please explain in the comments if I've gone horribly wrong in my thinking here.

* In my "modern philosophy" course in college, we enjoyed the part where we got to Spinoza and all of the sudden it became like we were studying a self-help book. [back]